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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made a short stealth tour of a handful of states this week with a demand that we all “rethink schools.”

She gave Wyoming school officials less than a day to prepare for her visit, but 30 activists were motivated enough to turn out to protest her bad ideas.

PAA’s interim executive director Julie Woestehoff, who lives in Wyoming (though on the other side of the state where DeVos visited), sent this letter to the main state-wide newspaper:

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos demands that we “rethink schools,” she really means that we should mindlessly accept the way big businesses refuse to pay their fair share of education funding but demand more ways to profit off of schoolchildren. To Mrs. DeVos, “rethinking schools” means ignoring the facts about the failure of school voucher programs and the mediocre results of most charter schools, and agreeing with to divert more public school funds into these ineffective programs. “Rethinking schools” to Mrs. DeVos means believing that “Pay for Success” social investment bonds are designed to help schoolchildren and save taxpayer money, not to make money for hedge funders, or that “personalized learning” is only meant to support healthy child development, not to ease corporate access to our children’s private data. Thinking individuals will reject Mrs DeVos’s misleading rhetoric and work even harder to protect our precious system of public education from her attack.